Visual Disobedience: Art and Decoloniality in Central America

by Kency Cornejo

In Visual Disobedience, Kency Cornejo traces the emergence of new artistic strategies for Indigenous, feminist, and anticarceral resistance in the wake of torture, disappearance, killings, and US-funded civil wars in Central America. Cornejo reveals a direct line from US intervention to current forms of racial, economic, and gender injustice in the isthmus, connecting this to the criminalization and incarceration of migrants at the US-Mexico border today. Drawing on interviews with Central American artists and curators, she theorizes a form of “visual disobedience” in which art operates in opposition to nation-states, colonialism, and visual coloniality. She counters historical erasure by examining over eighty artworks and highlighting forty artists across the region. Cornejo also rejects the normalized image of the suffering Central American individual by repositioning artists as creative agents of their own realities. With this a comprehensive exploration of contemporary Central American art, Cornejo highlights the role of visual disobedience as a strategy of decolonial aesthetics to expose and combat coloniality, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, empire, and other systems of oppression.

Genres: Art

304 pages, Hardcover

Published October 18, 2024

Reviews

[Miguel Fernandez · Rating 5 out of 5]

The conclusion really ties this book together in a compelling way.

[Pablo Enrique · Rating 3 out of 5]

This text serves as a valuable and extensive archive, bringing to light a significant body of contemporary artistic work from a region often overlooked in broader cultural conversations. Its primary strength lies in its function as a historical document, meticulously cataloging and describing a wide range of performance pieces, installations, and other artworks that confront the tangible, real-world challenges of political violence, systemic injustice, and mass migration. The narrative is most compelling when it focuses on the direct actions of the artists themselves — powerful, often physical expressions of defiance that need little interpretation to convey their meaning. By presenting these works, the book successfully chronicles a history of resilience and provides an important counter-narrative to the simplistic and often dehumanizing imagery prevalent in dominant media.

However, the analytical project of the book is hampered by its deep reliance on a specific and unfalsifiable ideological lens. The entire interpretive structure is built upon a lexicon of academic jargon that treats subjective social theories as if they were empirical fact. This framework is presented not as a theory to be tested and debated, but as an axiom through which all evidence must be filtered. Such an approach is inconsistent with a rigorous pursuit of truth, as it risks descending into the very dogmatism it purports to critique. The consistent application of this lens threatens to flatten the profound, individual works of art into mere illustrations of a pre-approved political thesis, potentially trapping them within a rigid binary of oppressor and oppressed that can foster more division than understanding.

Ultimately, the artworks documented within these pages are often more powerful and intellectually resonant than the theoretical framework imposed upon them. As an introduction to the contemporary art of Central America and as a testament to the human spirit's creative response to suffering, this book is a significant resource. Its value as an archive is clear; its value as a logically consistent analysis, however, is undermined by its commitment to an ideological project over an evidence-based inquiry.